Inside a Cartel's Underground Drug-Tunnel for Weed

On a quiet night along the Tijuana border, you can almost hear them coming: the faint scraping of metal on dirt, falling clumps of earth, muted voices in the depths. At any given moment, there are men underground here, chipping their way toward the United States with antlike determination.

Many of the drug tunnels will be discovered and shut down before they’re operational, but it doesn’t matter; more will come. The economics are unassailable. A good tunnel can take nine months or more to build and cost up to $2 million, but if it can stay open for only a few hours, the cartels can move enough marijuana through it to satisfy entire time zones—making enough money to pay for twenty more tunnels. That is why they never stop coming, and why, on November 29, 2011, Special Agent Tony Armanza1 found himself lying in the bushes overlooking a nondescript warehouse in San Diego’s Otay Mesa, waiting for signs that one of the tunnels was about to go live.

It’s getting dark out here, man. I’m starving, he said into the radio. What are we gonna do? He and half a dozen other agents from the San Diego Tunnel Task Force had been watching the warehouse since 5 A.M.—an hour they sardonically called the butt crack of dawn. Armanza, face-first in the dirt all day, had been on countless stakeouts before and knew that the odds of the warehouse becoming active were diminishing with the sun; tunnel traffickers like to move their drug shipments during the day, when their trucks can blend in with the thousands of others coursing through the busy shipping district.

Half a mile away, Tim Durst, the supervisor of the task force, heard the exhaustion in Armanza’s voice. Durst was well liked by his men; he knew that Armanza wasn’t the only one tired. With a strong, goateed chin, an angular face, and closely cropped brown hair, Durst looks like a slightly weathered version of the G-man Keanu Reeves played in Point Break. He had been taking down tunnels on the mesa for five years, and today nearly one hundred agents and local cops were on call, all of them waiting for Durst’s decision. Five more minutes, he told his team. Experience had taught him that successful operations sometimes hinged on ridiculously small windows of time and chance. Sure enough, a few minutes later, Armanza reported that a tractor-trailer had backed up to the warehouse’s docking bay.

Armanza couldn’t see inside the warehouse, but he knew what was going on: Men caked with dirt would be scrambling to load shrink-wrapped bales of marijuana—fresh from their passage through the tunnel—onto a truck as quickly as possible. Each bale would weigh some fifty pounds and would soon be tucked into a crate or cardboard box. One by one, they’d be lifted onto the semi. Hundreds of them.

An hour later, when the work was done, the truck’s engine roared and the rig pulled away from the warehouse district, heading north toward the freeway. The agents could have stopped it immediately for an easy seizure, which would give them a search warrant to enter the warehouse and take the tunnel, but Durst’s goal was strategic: He wanted not just to disrupt the operation but to deal a critical blow to the Sinaloa cartel. That meant following the truck and arresting as many players as possible. As the semi turned onto the freeway, teams of agents in unmarked vehicles followed, each car dropping off as another one picked up the tail, passing the eye. But after only thirty miles, the truck’s driver pulled onto a side road, got out of the truck, and walked away.

We’re burned, crackled an agent’s voice over the radio. He’s abandoning the truck.

This meant another decision for Durst: Should he order his men to move on the truck or wait and see if this was a handoff? He told everyone to wait through the night. At about 6 A.M., another car pulled up and dropped off a fresh driver, who got into the truck and resumed moving the load.

The new driver was cautious, trained to pick up tails. First he continued north, toward Los Angeles, then east, then west again. He finally pulled into a warehouse in the City of Industry, a dense industrial zone outside L.A., where he met with at least four other men. They powwowed for a few minutes; then the semi driver motored to yet another warehouse, where five vans were waiting. It was gonna be like The Italian Job, Durst would later say. They were gonna load the dope into the vans and all leave and go in different directions.

Durst wanted to wait once more and follow the vans. Where would they go? How many more nodes of the cartel’s distribution ring could he take down? By now he had called forty-five men into the field. Helicopters buzzed overhead. Tailing five vans to God knew where would require more men and resources than he could readily muster. The whole operation was on the verge of becoming a crazy, unwieldy hydra. Durst had let the string unwind to the last manageable point; now there was only one option.

Take it down, he finally said.

As a veteran of an unwinnable war that has gone on for twenty-one years and turned the U.S.-Mexican border into Swiss cheese, he’d given that order many times before. But this bust would be unlike any other. In addition to the vans, there was the tunnel itself, which turned out to be a marvel of illegal engineering. The Mexican entrance, hidden in a two-story warehouse near the airport, had an elevator that popped up out of a tile floor. Its shaft descended thirty feet, to a staging area where bales could be loaded onto an electrically driven mining car. The railway traveled through the 550-yard tunnel atop wood planks. It is clearly the most sophisticated tunnel we have ever found, said Lauren Mack, the task-force spokesperson on-site at the time. The tunnel—along with many others—was believed to be the pet project of a single man. American law enforcement had been hunting him for years, but he had always managed to remain far enough removed from his creations that nobody could get to him. That is, until Durst let the string unwind—right to his doorstep.

Of all the ways pot comes across the border—in hidden compartments of cars driving through legal ports of entry, on boats and airplanes, or lugged in burlap sacks by human mules—none are as efficient and profitable as a drug tunnel. Ever since the first one was discovered, in 1990, most have been linked to a single organization, the Sinaloa cartel, now one of the largest drug-trafficking organizations in the world. They are an innovation, in fact, that is inextricably tied to the rise of both the cartel itself and its leader, Joaqu&#xED;n El Chapo Guzm&#xE1;n Loera, currently the most wanted man in Mexico.

Believed to be in his midfifties, Chapo is the son of a poor cattleman from Sonora who also grew opium poppies. He got his nickname—Shorty—thanks to his five-foot-six-inch height, and he was briefly the only outlaw billionaire on the Forbes richest list. Legend has it that he has eluded capture largely because of his expertise at bribing officials. But the more likely reason is his unrelenting focus on one thing and one thing only: moving drugs. When he engages in other enterprises—kidnapping, extortion, and mass murder—it’s largely in service of the business’s bottom line.

After learning the ropes of narco-trafficking from one of his father’s friends, he quickly rose through the ranks of what would become the dominant group in Baja, the Arellano-Felix Organization, or AFO. While there, Chapo is believed to have pioneered the first drug tunnel discovered, a football-field-length passage connecting a home in Agua Prieta, Mexico, to a warehouse in Douglas, Arizona. The passage was well lit, its walls lined with concrete; a sump pump had been installed to prevent flooding. But most ingenious was the tunnel’s entrance, hidden beneath a pool table and a concrete slab in the house’s family room. When an operator turned a small spigot-like device, a hydraulic lift would raise both the slab and the pool table five feet in the air, revealing a portal. It was like something out of a James Bond movie, said a Customs spokeswoman at the time. Authorities estimated that hundreds of millions of dollars in cocaine and marijuana had moved through in just over six months.

If there is a patron narco-saint of drug tunnels, it is "El Chapo" Guzm&#xE1;n, head of the Sinaloa cartel.

Chapo and the AFO were so impressed with the Douglas tunnel that they began constructing more passages, many of them in Tijuana, but throughout the 1990s more established, cheaper smuggling methods dominated. Then came the border crackdown following September 11. Chapo, who by now was head of a rising AFO splinter cartel known as Sinaloa, needed a new way to get his product in. That’s when he—or someone close to him—did the math.

A large part of the Sinaloa cartel’s estimated $3 billion profits comes from marijuana, but weed is bulky. Huge piles of it back up in Tijuana warehouses after every harvest as brokers and the cartel scramble to find ways to get it into the United States. Building a tunnel is time-consuming and expensive, but it can pay for itself many times over in a single day. No sniffing dogs, no checkpoints, just a straight shot into the world’s largest drug market. Since a tunnel can’t be moved, it’s also a liability, easily shut down if discovered. The key would be to build not just one tunnel at a time but many. To do that, Chapo needed an area close to the U.S. border where it was easy to dig, with many possibilities for hidden exit points on the other side.

It had always been right under his feet: San Diego’s Otay Mesa. A five-mile-long, 500-foot-high plateau that rises gently as it crosses the American border, the mesa is made of clay called bentonite that is self-supporting and as workable as wax. Best of all, the area had become one of the busiest warehouse districts in the Southwest, thanks to a new immigration checkpoint. So it was decided. Otay would become the latest front in the cartels’ unending siege on the U.S. border.

This is our south-side entrance right here, task-force special agent Ryan Thomas* said, pointing toward the grainy image of a warehouse on a plasma screen. This is live, right now.… We believe this to be a drug tunnel in progress.

We were in a windowless surveillance room. A hidden camera was capturing the image in front of us—a suspected dig site just across the border in Mexico—then transmitting it to a satellite that beamed it directly to our bunker.

In front of us were two guys who looked like a couple of day laborers clocking time in the gritty industrial lots straddling the U.S. border. The scarecrows lifted burlap sacks, opened gates for a truck, hosed out plastic buckets. Every few minutes, one of them would stretch his arms in apparent exhaustion or boredom. It was hard to believe that inside the warehouse just a few feet away was a hole that dropped down three stories to a passage. There, in the half darkness, a half-dozen men were clawing their way toward America with picks and shovels.

Although the exit point hadn’t been identified yet, it would be an Otay Mesa warehouse situated anywhere from a few hundred yards to half a mile away. The bottom line is, you can probably shoot a bullet in the air and it’ll land on a warehouse that’s doing something illegal in this area, Durst told me later, as we drove around the mesa on a bright spring day. As he steered, his brown eyes were in a default cop-mode setting, restless, searching for abnormalities.

Surrounding us was a sea of nondescript block-long rectangles of glass and concrete, each one housing dozens of warehouses. The truck traffic was like something from D-day. At one stoplight, thirty-four semis rumbled by, no doubt loaded with every kind of imported good imaginable: watermelons, maritime equipment, plush toys, and quite possibly illegal drugs. On each block, Durst pointed out warehouses where the task force had found drug tunnels, clicking off names that sounded like battlefields: the Election Day Tunnel, Thanksgiving Day Tunnel, the Kerns Tunnel, the Italian Job Tunnel…

It took three years for the task force to score its first big hit, after a Mexican informant led them to the El Grande Tunnel in 2006. At 2,800 feet, it still lives up to its name as the longest drug tunnel ever discovered. It was just massive, says Durst. It was a half-mile long. You could almost drive a Mini Cooper through that tunnel.

The informant only knew the location of the Mexican warehouse where the tunnel had started, so the task force began spying on it. They noticed box trucks filled with water barrels leaving the site; the drivers would pump off the water into a storm drain in a nearby neighborhood. Why is so much water coming out of a warehouse? Durst and his team wondered. They consulted mining experts, who told them that this was a common problem in the underground world: Deep tunnels often flood.

Desperate to find the U.S. exit, Durst and dozens of undercover federal agents scoured the mesa, posting watches on every warehouse that lay within a radius of potential exit points, even watching traffic through binoculars from rooftops—with no luck. Since an open tunnel is a national-security threat, the task force’s parent agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, notified the Mexican military, which tried to get a permit to raid the warehouse. But according to agents, a judge in Mexico stalled. Fifty-two hours later, long after the traffickers had caught wind of the raid and abandoned the tunnel, the Mexicans finally sent a team through the tunnel to locate the U.S. exit. The outlet turned out to be a fake produce distributor, a half-mile from where the task force thought it would be. In the end, just over two tons of marijuana was recovered—a relatively small seizure when it comes to tunnels. But the tunnel’s size and sophistication were a revelation to the force. Our downfall was that we didn’t think big enough, said Durst. And so now we think as big as possible and think anything’s possible.

Chapo and the Sinaloa Cartel have always been good at thinking big.

To ramp up tunnel construction, Chapo developed a system of renting dig houses and warehouses on both sides of the border, setting up fake business fronts, then managing crews of diggers—all while keeping the locations of the tunnels secret. In Tijuana, where the inhabitants know better than to ask questions, buying dig houses is easy. Leasing warehouses in Otay Mesa, where the occupancy rate is low and real estate owners are happy as long as they get paid, isn’t much more difficult. Most complicated is the dig itself.

Rumor has it that in the early days, the cartels hired unskilled laborers to dig the tunnels, ecuting them afterward to preserve secrecy. True or not, the tale serves as a warning, and few diggers ever speak of their experiences. One of the only credible reports about the life of diggers comes from Marco Tulio Castro, a Mexican journalist who obtained copies of statements from workers captured by the Mexican army. After he published their story, Castro was threatened with death.

According to the report, the most outspoken of the workers was Francisco Riesgo Tu&#xF1;&#xF3;n, a delinquent from Guadalajara. Before the tunneling started, Tu&#xF1;&#xF3;n was serving time in Tijuana’s La Mesa Penitentiary when he ran into a childhood friend, a car thief named Humberto Villarreal Pinedo. Humberto offered Francisco a lifeline: a roofing job and a place to stay when he got out. To Francisco’s surprise, Humberto made good on his promise, sheltering and feeding Francisco in his own home, where he was busy organizing what seemed to be a legitimate, if motley, construction crew consisting of a deportee, a cowboy, a bricklayer’s assistant, and father-and-son gardeners.

Unbeknownst to any of them, their benefactor had a boss of his own: Teodoro El Teo Garc&#xED;a Simental, a former leader of the AFO, who was loosely allied with Chapo and known for dissolving the bodies of his enemies in barrels of caustic acid. It wasn’t until the workers took a ride across town in the back of a Ford pickup that they realized they wouldn’t be constructing houses. As they neared the border, Humberto told them to stay low so as to avoid being seen by police. They weren’t allowed to lift their heads until they entered the garage of a house, where two men with rifles stood at attention. When one of the laborers asked what was going on, he was told he was fucked. It was a tunnel job, the riflemen said, and he was going to have to descend.

The dig house was a two-story home in Tijuana’s Colonia Libertad neighborhood. On the ground floor was what appeared to be a plant nursery—a clever front to explain the movement of large amounts of dirt. Before the dig started, Humberto confiscated his crew’s identification documents and told them he had the names of family members. Then he handed out tools: a pick, a shovel, a wheelbarrow, a jackhammer, and some small powered hammers to break holes in the floor.

That first day, they broke through the floor of a bedroom, beginning a shaft that would eventually reach thirty feet deep.

Twelve hours a day they spent in the pit, hauling out bags of soil with a rope and bucket. Meals—almost always chicken or sausage—were lowered to them in the same bucket. At night they slept in bedrooms on the second floor of the plant nursery while Humberto took the master bedroom, which had its own private bathroom. After work on Saturdays, Humberto handed each of them a white envelope stuffed with 2,000 pesos—about $150.

Rest came only on Sundays, and since leaving the house was forbidden, they lounged around on mattresses, watching television and mulling their plight. Why are you treating me this way? a ba&#xB1;ed Francisco asked his childhood friend time and again. Humberto never gave him an answer.

After completing the vertical shaft, they began the long, dark drive toward the United States. Humberto demanded that they dig thirteen feet a day, but the men knew nothing about tunneling; whenever they encountered a problem—an engineering puzzle or a directional conundrum—written instructions would be waiting for them in the tunnel the next morning, orders from an invisible engineer whom Humberto referred to as Don Mario. The men shored up the walls as instructed, reinforcing them to prevent cave-ins. As work progressed, they became increasingly preoccupied with their fate. Humberto told me that we will finish the tunnel and they are going to let us go, Francisco later said. But I was thinking that they’d kill us.

Agents on the U.S side prepare to descend into the "Italian Job" Tunnel.

For reassurance, the diggers carved an altar into a wall inside the tunnel with compartments for the Sacred Heart, the Virgin Mary, and Jude the Apostle, the patron saint of desperate causes. They also put up a portrait of Jess Malverde, a Robin Hood-esque hero from Sinaloa folklore, also known as the narco-saint. On the altar, one of them left a prayer to Jude: Intercessor of all difficult problems, give me a job in which I become human and my family doesn’t want for anything in life.

After two months, the intercession came. Responding to a tip, the Mexican military raided the tunnel house. They apprehended the diggers and threw them all in jail, but with no real evidence that the workers were anything but slaves, the Mexican federal prosecutor released them after forty days. They promptly vanished.

Humberto, the deceitful foreman, was eventually transferred to a federal penitentiary to await further prosecution. On July 15, 2011, a riot erupted at the prison. While the guards were distracted, he and sixty other inmates escaped. Their portal to freedom: a tunnel, hidden ben ath a water tank.

When Durst’s men stormed the City of Industry warehouse during the Italian Job raid, they met no resistance from the four dumbfounded men standing inside. The tractor trailer they’d tailed from Otay Mesa was packed to the brim with nearly 500 bales of weed—almost twelve tons. Later, when they entered the U.S. warehouse hiding the tunnel’s exit, they found a staggering pile of pot—nearly seventeen tons, all of it wrapped in cellophane and stacked head-high. Soldiers on the Mexican side, meanwhile, raided the warehouse hiding the tunnel’s entrance and nabbed about four tons more. Collectively it amounted to just over thirty-two tons, the second-largest weed seizure in U.S. history, with a street value of $65 million.

On both sides of the border, the agents were practically giddy. The Mexican general overseeing the Tijuana side of the operation couldn’t resist trying out the high-end rail cart. Suddenly this Mexican general comes out of the hole, wearing a pearl-handled .45, recalls Durst. The task force then began joyriding themselves. That cart, that rail system. I don’t know how long it took to make, but it was really good, said Durst. I drove it, literally drove the cart down the rail and back. It drove really nice for in a tunnel.

But it was the intelligence that came out of the Italian Job bust that proved to be the biggest boon. Durst is prohibited from revealing the details, but based on the federal indictments that came later, at least two of the arrestees had information that led to a man whom U.S. law enforcement had been chasing for years. Known as El Gato—the Cat—and also El Viejo—the Old Man—he was thought to work under Chapo and was long suspected of being the mastermind behind many of the Otay Mesa tunnels. His aliases suggested, rightly, that he was a crafty operator who had been in the game a long time. Interrogations revealed his real name: José S&#xE1;nchez Villalobos.

According to U.S. and Mexican authorities, he is the regional manager for the Sinaloa cartel’s operations in Jalisco and Baja, which includes Tijuana—the man who coordinates all the drug shipments that move through those areas, the CFO of the cartel’s busiest and most lucrative trafficking zone. Like Chapo, Villalobos is short, with a broad, pugnacious face. Durst and his team were able to link him not only to the Italian Job Tunnel but also to 2010’s Thanksgiving Day Tunnel—another of the most sophisticated tunnels ever found. If the Old Man had served the cartel as long as his alias implied, at the very least he would have known about every Sinaloa tunnel to cross the border in recent years—dozens.

Following the Italian Job seizure, Villalobos knew—or at least worried—that the authorities were onto him. On November 18, 2011, the Mexican army seized $15,300,000 during a raid on a home in Tijuana—the kind of cash that only comes from tunnel operations. They linked it to Villalobos and put a warrant out on him. He holed up in Guadalajara, Sinaloa’s historical stronghold, where he was arrested in a raid on January 15, 2012. He is currently in the custody of a Mexican federal prosecutor against organized crime, and the United States is trying to extradite him.

When I met with Durst and the task force in May 2012, four months after Villalobos was captured, not even Durst knew how significant the arrest would be. After allowing me into the surveillance room to watch the latest tunnel being built, he invited me to the presumptive bust, which would most likely take place in the fall. But that didn’t happen. Instead, something unusual for Otay Mesa took place.

All tunneling activity ceased.

No more scarecrows putting on shows in front of false businesses, no more trucks leaving with water or dirt. It just stopped, Durst said in November. It’s a ghost town.

The only explanation anyone could come up with was that Chapo, worried that Villalobos had been compromised, had halted all tunnel operations into Otay Mesa. It would be a fruitless tunnel season for all. The tunnel construction I had seen on the plasma screen in the bunker wasn’t even the only one going; the task force had already known of at least four tunnels under development, and every one of them had stopped. Desperate to move their product, the cartel was sending flotillas of panga boats up the coast and dumping their loads on Southern California beaches. It raised a question: Had the task force finally shut down the mesa? I wouldn’t go that far, Durst cautioned. The cartel had ceased digging before, only to restart months later once they were convinced the coast was clear. But this time it seemed a whole year would pass before the cartel completed another tunnel, which the task force seized last November on the day it opened.

Otay is increasingly looking like a losing battle for the traffickers. Yet already, naturally, the cartel has thought up a contingency plan: an evolution, now in its RD phase, that threatens to increase the number of tunnels burrowing their way into the U.S. exponentially—all thanks to technology stolen from the most profitable industry on earth.

The land east of Otay Mesa, around the agricultural towns of Calexico and Mexicali, is a terrible place to build a sophisticated drug tunnel. The soil is unstable, and the All-American Canal, an eighty-mile-long aqueduct that surrounds Calexico, presents a formidable obstacle. Still, the cartels have found a way.

In October 2008, Mexican authorities, responding to reports of a cave-in and flooding near the canal, discovered a tunnel unlike anything they’d ever seen. Only ten inches wide, it was essentially a pipe. The Mexican cops traced it back to a house about 600 feet from the border, where they found a tractor-like vehicle with a long barrel on its side—a horizontal directional drill, or HDD. Used by oil, gas, and utility industries to quickly bore conduit holes over significant depths and distances, this drill was believed to belong to the AFO. It was the cartel’s first known attempt to use cutting-edge industrial equipment to build—in the most literal sense of the word—a drug pipeline.

From a trafficker’s point of view, an HDD is a dream come true. Not a lot of sophistication is required on their end, Jose Garcia, Durst’s boss, explained to me when I visited him at the El Centro field office near Calexico. All one needs, he said, is knowledge of how to maneuver the machine. It’s easy. It’s fast. With some training, a single operator can drill a thousand-foot-long tunnel, burrowing at any angle, in a matter of weeks. The most advanced HDDs monitor your progress in real time while a self-feeding system automatically lays pipe. The biggest industrial rigs can drill holes five feet in diameter, wide enough for a human.

Since 2008, seven HDD operations have been discovered in the Calexico area. They’ve all been shut down by tips or exposed, because they’ve collided with city infrastructure, but Garcia believes it’s only a matter of time before the cartels perfect the system. They keep improving their knowledge and rising in sophistication, he said. They’ve got the bucks.

We drove to a site where the latest operation had been discovered: a former Vons supermarket in a mostly abandoned strip mall just west of Calexico. There was gonna be a legit front business in there, he explained. It was gonna be called Baja Bikes. Motorcycles. Dirt bikes for the desert. How much business they actually did, I don’t know.

In August 2011, a beauty parlor next door had complained to the local fire department about a foul chemical stench. The fire department called in a hazmat unit, which broke through Baja Bikes’ back doors. Inside, they found a Ditch Witch JT8020—a sophisticated HDD. Long as a fire truck, the rig was so big that the operators had smashed into the building’s ceiling to properly deploy it. Those are maxi rigs, as big as they come, Garcia said. Brand-new, we’re looking at $500,000. They bought it used for $120,000.

The irony was that the foul smell hadn’t even come from the Vons; it had stemmed from a faulty sewage system in the beauty parlor. The pipe’s destination, probably a Mexicali warehouse, sat on the other side of the All-American Canal. The plan had been to drill right underneath the canal—an unthinkable feat for a traditional tunnel but routine for HDDs. If it hadn’t been for the mix-up with the beauty parlor, the traffickers might have succeeded in creating a functional pipeline in the last place anyone would look, next to a river.

If the cartel can master HDDs, not even the Rio Grande will be an obstacle. They’ll be able to dig tunnels within weeks, shrinking them to the size of plumbing pipes, and literally drill into the United States almost anywhere along the border they choose. America’s insatiable appetite for drugs could be satisfied by many small, almost undetectable taps—dozens of pipes snaking into the depths like some fever-dream sketch by Rube Goldberg, making ludicrous the very idea of a war on drugs. The cartels will use these like bank chutes, or maybe install a pulley system, Garcia said. They’re gonna shoot drugs through or money back or whatever. He paused, turning the idea in his head. It’s actually a pretty scary thing, to be honest with you, because you can do this— he raised his fingers, the sound of the snap vanishing into the dry hot air—like that.

1.Agent’s name changed to protect his identity.

Jason Kerstenis a writer based in Brooklyn. This is his first story for GQ.

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